


Afterparty

by t34lbloods (perculious)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Ouroboros Mix, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-14
Updated: 2013-03-14
Packaged: 2017-12-05 08:50:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/721182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/perculious/pseuds/t34lbloods
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jane and Dave debrief.</p><p>Ouroboros remix of <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/344316">Hollywood Shenanigans</a>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Afterparty

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Hollywood Shenanigans](https://archiveofourown.org/works/344316) by [Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer). 



> I hope this fulfills what's required for a remix - I feel like I just pulled back the edges of the fic a little. I won't name my betas for the sake of preserving anonymity, but big thanks to them, and thanks to edenfalling as well, because I was thrilled with this assignment. The original fic is lovely! As in fact were all the options I was assigned.

TT: Hey Jane.  
GG: Oh! Hello, Dirk!  
GG: What good timing! I just got home. I suppose Dave isn’t back yet?  
TT: Nah. Not yet.  
TT: How was it?  
GG: I’m hesitant to say before your brother has given his take on the evening’s undertakings.  
GG: But from my perspective I’d say it was a ringing success!  
GG: Although not quite what I expected. But when one makes a point of expecting the unexpected, surprises can only be welcome!  
TT: What was unexpected?  
GG: Um.  
GG: Maybe you should ask your brother! I’m not entirely sure what the secrecy classification is on any of this.  
GG: If that’s not a thoroughly odd thing to say. It was a public event, after all.  
TT: Jane.  
TT: My respect for your intelligence could fill the Empire fucking State, but I don’t know if you’re grasping the complex layers of fraternal ironic bullshit here.  
TT: I can’t just ask him how his evening was.  
TT: Especially not when he was in the presence of one of my best friends, who I personally have never met. I gotta approach it with a little more subtlety than that.   
TT: In fact, when he gets back here I’m probably going to have to pretend I already went to bed.  
TT: There will be no eager bright-eyed exclamations of having waited up. I am not going to greet him with a mug of tea in anticipation of a cozy chat about the evening’s gossip.  
TT: That would give him the mistaken impression that I give a shit about his fancy Hollywood party. When actually I give a shit about the social debut of Miss Jane Crocker, heir to Crockercorp, and what she has to say on the matter. So.  
TT: How was it?  
GG: Ummmm.  
GG: You’re right, Dirk, I really don’t understand the relationship between you two!  
GG: From everything you’ve said, I was expecting...  
GG: Well, another version of you, I suppose! Someone cryptic and complicated with more riddles than answers and an infuriating reticence to talk about either.  
GG: And I guess in some ways that is what I got! He’s difficult to read for more reasons than his attachment to eyewear that I have to say is slightly more sensible than the variety you favor.  
TT: My shades are rad as fuck.  
GG: Certainly.  
GG: But despite the air of mystery, he was kind and understanding. Really a gentleman!  
GG: And I almost felt like there were things he wanted to say that he couldn’t. Almost like he was attempting to give me the clues to let me figure it out by myself.  
GG: He must have heard about my particular set of interests! :B  
GG: No, I’m sure I’m only being fanciful.  
TT: He’s a tricky bastard.  
TT: He’s actually got all kinds of levels on me on the irony front. His shit is insane.  
TT: He’s got this way of appearing to be open and transparent by putting on a facade of guardedness that’s intentionally paper-thin.  
TT: The shades are such a fucking neon flashing sign screaming “trust issues” that everyone thinks they see right through him. Gives people the smug feeling that they’re the only one who can suss out the true Dave Strider behind the mask.  
TT: When really that transparency is itself a cover, concealing the deeper layers of meaning in his work and the unsaid nuances to his seemingly shallow interview responses.  
TT: All of which is in fact a cover of its own, given that at its absolute base level, the work is meaningless and everything he says is true.  
TT: The truth is, he’s a fucking genius.  
GG: If you say so!  
GG: If any of that was happening, I’m sure I didn’t notice. He was a charming and attentive escort.  
TT: I’m sure he had a good time too.  
GG: I hope so! I think there were some kind of shenanigans happening with his latest cinematic endeavor that he was concerned about.  
GG: He seemed stressed.  
TT: The Geromy thing?  
GG: That’s the ticket.  
TT: How did he seem stressed?  
GG: How do you mean?  
TT: I mean, what made you think he was stressed. What was he doing?  
GG: Oh, Dirk, I’m sure you know him better than I do! I don’t want to seem presumptuous.  
TT: I wouldn’t be so sure about that.  
TT: He’s been pretty busy with the Geromy thing. I haven’t seen him a lot.  
GG: Oh no, Dirk. Don’t say that.  
GG: I’m sure he would be there if he could spare the time! :(  
TT: Nah, I know. Don’t worry about it.  
TT: My bro and I have our shit worked out. We’re tight as the slapped palms in a sweet high-five. Tingling gently with the warm aftereffects of some dope bro bonding time.  
TT: I’m not stressin’. Just tryin’ to get some premium-grade info here from a secondary source.  
GG: Well, alrighty then!  
GG: It just seemed like he had a lot on his mind.  
GG: Dirk, I know it’s silly, but I can’t shake the feeling that there really might be something odd happening with this movie! Everyone was certainly acting suspicious about it.  
GG: Perhaps that’s always the case with these show business types. I’m sure I wouldn’t know.  
TT: If anyone can crack the case, Jane, it’s sure as shit you.  
GG: Oh, don’t. I know it was absurd of me to say I thought he was setting it up like a mystery for me.  
GG: I have no idea what I was thinking! I know my playing at being a detective is just a childish game.  
GG: I was being rude and listening into conversations I shouldn’t have, and he was only trying to be nice about it.  
GG: Please relay to him the warmest of thanks when he gets home.  
TT: Sure thing. But try not to write your instincts off too fast, Crocker. You never know with my bro.  
TT: Maybe he knew that mysteries are what tickles your knickers. Or maybe he did have shit he wanted you to know but couldn’t tell you.  
TT: Maybe it was just a workaround for the legendary Jane skepticism.  
TT: Sometimes lurking suspicions can feel more real than a story that you can’t bring yourself to believe straight-up.  
GG: Stop it, Dirk. I know it was silly. You don’t need to continue making fun of me.  
GG: All in all, your brother was a wonderful date.  
GG: Oh shoot. I mean, chaperone.  
TT: ...  
GG: He chaperoned me wonderfully.  
GG: I truly hope he felt the same about me.  
GG: I mean, about being a good chaperone! That’s all.  
GG: Not that I was chaperoning him, of course! That doesn’t even make any sense!!  
GG: Darn it, Dirk, you know what I mean!  
TT: Sure.  
GG: Anyway, tell him thanks. I’m going to sleep now before anything else unexpected happens!  
TT: Ok.  
TT: Night.  
GG: Good night! :B

-

Dave rolls into the motel room around eleven AM. Rose is sitting perched neatly on the edge of the cheap foam-seated desk chair, her legs crossed at the ankle and her hands folded on her lap. Like she’s been sitting there angling that precise, slightly judgmental gaze at the door since nine, which was when they agreed to meet.

“Jet lag,” Dave says, and raises his TEHMROS of coffee a fraction by way of explanation.

“Jet lag from Washington to California.”

“I took a jet, Rose.”

“I’m sure.”

The room is possibly the trashiest one yet. Rose always picks the sleaziest meeting spots for their rendezvous. Dave is about 97% sure that she does it on purpose, just to watch him ignore the tell-tale stains on the carpets and the suspicious stickiness left on various flat surfaces. The 3% uncertainty is just because he’s learned that if you assume you’ve got Rose Lalonde all figured out, you’re probably wrong. On the other hand, it’s what he would do, and Rose is a lot more similar to him than any of the paparazzi photos of the two of them together with splashy “Opposites attract!” headlines would have people believe. Rose cloaks her work in oblique metaphor and stuffy wizards, and he favors deliberate misspellings and blurry graphics, but it’s all essentially the same.

In this particular motel, the bedspread is a gaudy color of orange. Dave loves it instantly. He’s going to get Rose to sit on that bedspread at some point today, and he’s going to snap a gloriously awful mental picture of her pale skin and deep violet blouse juxtaposed against that rotten squash backdrop.

“Would you like some tea?” Rose says. The kettle on the desk clicks off as she’s speaking.

“No, thanks,” he says. He sits down on the bedspread himself, and she swivels her chair to face him. “Let’s get down to business.”

Rose reaches into the bag sitting at her feet, pulls out a magazine, and tosses it to him. “Page 32.”

He flips to it, and sees about what he expected. A little box insert of him with his hand on Jane’s shoulder, steering her towards the refreshments table. The blurb is headed, “Strider and Crocker seem to value canapes over their public feud!”

“Cute,” he says. It’s a shitty photo of him. He’s in the middle of speaking, and he’s making a weird face. Jane looks sweet. The Crockercorp red, as much as he hates to admit it, suits her.

“What did you think of her?”

He places the magazine next to him on the bed. “She’s a fucking kid. She was excited about the party.”

“You know what I mean.” Rose narrows her eyes at him, which annoys him. He’s seen Rose drunk and giggly at four am, and he’s seen her weepy and sober at noon. She’s got no business pretending to be the hardass here. “Is she something we need to worry about.”

“Ah, man.” Dave leans back on his palms. “You mean, is she a Crockerbot?”

“Loosely.”

“I don’t know, Rose. Look at her. She’s wearing the colors and she’s got the name. She’s got one of those little brainwipey headbands and she’s not a kid who’s about to step out of line. But if you’re asking if she’s directly working for the Witch, she’s not. I don’t think she knows shit about it, and if this is gonna go down as soon as you think it is, she never will.”

“It will and it won’t.” The motel doesn’t have mugs, just water glasses, so Dave can watch the tea diffuse in lingering spirals as Rose pours in the water. The glass is smudged, but Rose pretends not to notice. “For us, the world goes on and we march into the roles set for us by historic inevitability. For Jane Crocker, it ends in a couple of years.”

“I know, I fucking get it.” Like he needs her to hold his hand and explain the mechanics of parallel timestreams. “So if you’re asking if I think she’s gonna turn all fish-evil on us in the next couple of years, my answer is no. She’s a sweetheart.”

“Hmm.” Rose idly stirs the tea with a mini straw, although she didn’t add any sugar. “How is her strife capacity? Does she have the ruthless tendencies of a born warrior? The fierce gleam in her eye that speaks of untold capacities of strength and vigor? The appropriate set of tools with which to aid and protect our future spawn?”

“Jesus, don’t call them that.” Dave doesn’t know Dirk, but unless he’s a total dickweed, he probably doesn’t want to be referred to as Dave’s spawn. “Man, I dunno. She’s sheltered. Can’t really see her clawing apart any fierce-ass video game monsters.”

Rose had been the one to send operatives out to spy on the jungle kid, and shit there had been disappointing too. The initial reports on the island were encouraging; if there’s any environment that could train a kid up right to engage in digital battles for his life, it should be that fucking hellscape. But all the actual observation of the kid suggested he spends most of his time hiding out in what remains of his house, and someone scared of the monsters outside is gonna get chewed up and spat out like a wad of tobacco in the first five minutes of this video game bullshit.

“I thought as much.” Rose blows on her tea, holding the glass carefully by the rim with her fingertips. “You know what that means, Strider,” she says. “It looks like, once again, all the difficult work has landed squarely on our previously-burdened shoulders.”

She’s still playing Rose Lalonde, is the thing. She’s still being the pompous version of herself that Dave rolled his eyes at in countless hours of interviews, the little slip of a writer who made herself up in a pound of eyeliner and two pounds of purple eyeshadow and had a knack for staring down talk show hosts until they let her ask the questions. The lady Dave had once referred to as a having sped past pretension several exits ago and crossed the state line into horseshit. He can see her grip tighten on the glass of tea, her brows slightly furrowed as she gazes into her hands, and he realizes that she’s scared. For them, and for their kids.

“Hey,” he says. “It’s nothing we can’t handle. Our kids are gonna be the baddest of asses, Rose. I’m gonna leave that little prick so many shitty swords he’ll be lucky to make it to age two without a serious accident.”

“I suppose I should have said my previously-burdened shoulders,” Rose said, the corner of her lips quirking slightly upwards. “I wouldn’t trust you to create a child-safe environment for a baby cockroach. I imagine that poor Roxy will be forced to pull all of her friends out of death’s slavering jaws, time and time again. I am leaving her with all the necessary resources for the upbringing of an intelligent, competent young woman.”

“Like a fuckload of booze.”

“Precisely.” Rose doesn’t miss a beat.

It feels morbid, stocking up his apartment for the little asshole who’s coming after him. Dave knows he’s gonna die, but Rose can’t tell him when, exactly. So he’s left turning his apartment into a museum before he’s even moved out. Arranging his shit so that if he goes belly-up at a moment’s notice, his place is ready and waiting for unexpected guests. His little bro hasn’t been born yet, and he’s already beaten Dave at his own game. Four hundred years late to Dave’s two measly hours.

“Well then, we know they’re gonna be fine,” he says. “Roxy’ll kill all the monsters with her whiskey breath and Dirk can wield a katana with the scarred stumps that’ll be left of his limbs after growing up in Dave Strider’s Baby-Death-A-Porium Mangledome. And once they’ve gotten their asses handed to them like some dudes who just won a big helping of ass at the state fair, Jane and the jungle kid can crawl over their bodies to get up to the next level.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic, Strider.” Rose blows on her tea. “Surely Dirk will retain at least one intact appendage.”

“I hope it’s a leg so he can at least hop around like a little Strider pogo stick.”

“Not all the mysteries are permitted to be revealed to my sight at this time,” Rose says. The tilt of her shoulders looks slightly looser than it did before, the crease between her eyebrows not quite as prominent.

Dave tugs the magazine back onto his lap, and carefully tears out the relevant blurb with his thumbnail. Later, he can scan it and burn it onto a disc, so that Dirk can see his big bro hanging out with his little bespectacled friend. If Jane asks Dirk about it, he can pretend he got advance info on this rad meeting of the minds straight from his Hollywood star of a brother.

Because he did. Is going to. Whatever.


End file.
